Rainbows, gummy drops and my weekend with Jennifer Knapp

This past couple months I’ve been MIA in the blogosphere. In part because I’ve been busy with freelance stories and event promotions, and in part because my mood has just been too stable to have anything noteworthy to share. (Medication- it works!)

I tend to get inspiration for blogs from trials and turmoil. While I did have my share of trials this summer, the majority of my time and energy has been spent preparing for the upcoming birth of my first child and organizing a Jennifer Knapp concert for my church.

While I have to wait until January to meet my baby daughter, this weekend I had the opportunity to meet and host one of my favorite artists. Jennifer Knapp came to Lawrence to preform a free show at Plymouth Congregational Church and share her story as gay person of faith.

This show has been my pet project. I started working on it early in the year and saw it through from beginning to end. From getting approval for the funds through the church counsel to making sure the last light was turned off after the show on Saturday, I was there.

The concert was important to me on many levels. I think it’s important for people like Jennifer to share their stories to give hope to others who may feel like the church has turned their back on them. I think it’s important for churches who are open and affirming like Plymouth to provide a safe place for people to share their stories. I think it’s important to invite the community into these conversations, to provide a peaceful place to discuss and share stories, rather than debate and declare stances.

But at the end of the weekend, as I watched Jennifer Knapp preform her Sunday show at the Jackpot, I realized that my weekend with Jennifer was about more than sharing the message of Christian inclusiveness. Having the opportunity to break bread with her on Friday night with my new friends from Plymouth and then have some of my closest friends from college join me to hear her perform on Saturday helped connect my past to my present.

I grew up in a conservative Evangelical home. Just as the Apostle Paul considered himself a Jew among Jews, I was a religious right winger among religious right wingers. My views started to shift after I spent a year in the inner-city during what would have been my junior year of college.

After a severe episode of depression, followed by mania and an inpatient stay in the psychiatric ward, well, let’s just say my faith had been shaken too much to ever go back to the confidence required to be in the Evangelical community I had once embraced. I no longer felt at home in the church.

But my faith was something I just couldn’t shake. Eventually I started going to an emergent church called Jacob’s Well, where the community focused on questions more than answers, on the journey rather than the destination.

When I got married and moved to Lawrence, my husband and I stubbled onto Plymouth Congregational. From the first week we were there it felt like home. We go to a contemporary service where they play Bob Dylan covers and the young children dance around the stage. We hold hands at the end of the service as we sing a closing song. It’s the kind of church any hippie would gravitate towards. It is home.

And it’s at Plymouth that my two faith worlds collided. Jennifer Knapp told her story about working in the Contemporary Christian Music scene and leaving that scene to be honest with herself when faced with her sexual orientation. She chose love over dogma and expectations.

As I prepare to meet this beautiful little girl growing inside me, I hope that she will always chose love over dogma and expectations. I hope to teach her by living out this truth in my life.

Life is not always rainbows and gummy drops. Rainbows are accompanied by storms. And gummy drops inevitable create a sticky residue in the pot in which they are created which I’m sure is a pain in the ass to clean. I can’t protect my daughter from life’s storms or sticky situations. She won’t always be safe in my womb.

But what I can do is show her how to cultivate safe spaces. I can show her how to seek out places to be her sanctuary. In a way, that’s what the Jennifer Knapp concert was for me. I prayed that it would be safe space for people to share their stories about LGBTQ issues, but it ended up being a safe place for me to reconcile the faith of my past with that of my present.